> “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does,” Kagan told the Guardian.
No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to mine it with GPUs. Crypto obviously does not "need parallel processing" in the way that Nvidia GPUs provide it, because Ethereum removed that requirement entirely.
Nvidia's statement is like a shovel manufacturer declaring gold mining dead because people are no longer buying shovels (because they moved on to backhoes).
It's entirely possible for nvidia to be sour and also correct. Crypto currencies have done nothing for society but to introduce scam and money laundering vectors.
There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar cases in the future. We absolutely should have a way to exchange money without the governments involvement. The government already has the monopoly on physical force. That ought to be enough. So yes, there is a use case. But you’re correct in that it hasn’t really been used that way so far.
Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way.
Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections. Fools.
There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left.
Those protections are not perfect, true, but still orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all.
And as to monopoly on physical force, there is a reason for it, too. Take a look at African countries for what happens when people are allowed to take things into their own hands. Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force.
Our civilisation is far from perfect but it is a civilisation. It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. So think about it the next time you start imagining how good it would be without all this pesky civilisation around you. Because it is much better and productive to try to iteratively fix what we already have than decide to erase everything and start a complete rewrite.
> Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way.
Can you give an example? Do you actually know any of these people?
> Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections
Not me, So not everybody.
> There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left.
The reason is that their protocols are inherently unsafe. Similarly, there is a reason Bitcoin was made to be unregulated -- to protect the little guys from having their share devalued by trillion dollar bail-outs for the super rich.
> orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all
Better for who? Maybe better for you, but certainly not everyone.
> Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens
The video game??
> It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)
> Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
The crux of the issue, I think, and why I doubt decentralized stores of value will be legal for much longer.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild, probably apocryphally
(twawaaay) > > > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens
(mike741) > > The video game??
(JPws_Prntr_Fngr) > I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)
Essentially, what has happened is the application of Disney movie/show narratives taken outside of their intended context: What was meant as the starting point for guiding children on morality has instead been used as the ultimate end-goal & a shining beacon of what is considered to be moral or immoral.
In simpler terms, this is the "Disney-ification" of the political world: We're the good ones, they're the enemy, they must be opposed/defeated/unalived.
From the article:
> In high-rung politics, it’s understood that people aren’t 1s and 0s—they’re all 0.5s, each in their own messy, complicated, unique way. And to people who see people as 0.5s, it’s clear that PDW narratives not only dehumanize their opponents, they dehumanize everybody into fake cartoon people.
The repeating theme of crypto fans postulating "free" cashflow without government involvment is the road to salvation is annoying me so much.
Cashflow without government involvement is the absolute opposite of democratic freedom. Take literally any autocratic government ripe with corruption, look at Russia, China et al. Look at any large criminal organization which tries to avoid democratically elected governmental regulation of their cashflows.
Instead of being free, in a world with no oversight of how money is exchanged, 99.9% of people will wake up in modern servitude to a tiny rich oligarchy which owns all the assets and brutally opresses their slaves.
How this is not apparent to anyone is beyond me.
We already found a solution to the problem of being treated unfairly by a government: the judicial branch.
Think your money is frozen unfairly?
Then sue. Easy as that.
Going the other direction where government controls all aspects of society is what the USSR and China decided was the best system. When the USSR broke up they gave all citizens ownership of previously held state enterprises which was worthless to them and those shares were sold ended up in few players hands.
Crypto is the opposite where miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance.
You can't sue in Canada when the government introduces wartime measures. Like Canada was under attack
> miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance
I have no horse in this conversation about government, but I think it's important to note that neither developers nor miners hold any direct power in creating a balance on a properly decentralized blockchain. Their only power is insofar as they are able to convince users to collectively change their node software to introduce code that creates such a balance. A chain's developers are generally in a much better position to convince users of that than its miners (or stakers) are.
I am not going into the other direction though. I am not in any way saying the USSR or Chinese political system is or was desirable.
I explicitly gave the judicial branch as implemented in Western democratic societies as an example.
I'm no expert in Canadian politics, but to me it seems reasonable to assume that, just like in any other Western democratic society, the gov introducing wartime measures isn't what's day to day due process 99.9% of the time.
So you arguing based on extreme examples, which are at least partially out of context isn't really adding anything substantial to the discussion at hand I think.
How do miners hold as much power as big ass capitalists in a crypto world??
No. The few who had their accounts frozen had them unfrozen within days. The freezing was done by the banks without instruction from the government other than the existing "supporting terrorism" laws on the books (it was done by the banks of their own volition before the Emergencies Act was passed). Yes, efforts were being organized to bypass regulation by taking donations in cryptocoin but that turned out to be a scam and thankfully few of the donors were sophisticated enough to go beyond cheques and credit card donations to Give/Send/Go.
So, end in the end, a terrible example of why trusting the organized crime behind crypto is superior to the usual crowd and whether it has contributed anything useful to society. It's more of an example of how paranoia can blind one to reality.
The reason crypto never took off is because the government effectively backs a lot of the currency transactions indirectly, which makes engaging in such transactions a lot less risky for everyone involved. If such trust in the government wasn't there, everyone would have jumped on crypto ten-fold.
Yes, government has control over aspects of life, and humanity collectively organized governments specifically to have that power, because humanity early on realized that humans are emotion-prone individuals that cannot be trusted. All the anti-state rhetoric that you ever read completely ignores that fact.
Yes, there are going to be some negatives associated with this transfer of power that are going to happen, no complex systems like that are perfect. You probably would want someones account frozen if they were directly donating large sums of money to a terrorist group that was planning attacks on US. There are good cases for use of power, and bad ones. The fact that we aren't living in totalitarian regimes and still have plenty of individual of freedoms means that the system is working pretty well.
Crypto aside, it's difficult to point to a less deserving cause than the trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa for no good reason (the reasons are no good outside of delusionland).
^ Exhibit A: commenter fails to recognize that there are sometimes good reason to temporarily limit rights, such as to limit the spread of infectious diseases, because commenter knows very little about public health or epidemiology. Commenter believes that anytime rights are limited, it's for a nefarious purpose, and it can't possibly be for a good reason.
How's the syphillis and HIV treating you? Oh what's that? You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases by carefully limiting rights, so you're free to live your life without these diseases? Nice concept.
They also don’t understand that the “wartime act” is not the act that was invoked. In fact, the War Measures Act has not existed in Canada for nearly 40 years.
It was replaced by the Emergencies Act, which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unlike its predecessors.
It just goes to show how knowledgeable the previous poster is on the subject.
> which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Indeed indeed. However, it does limit the rights and freedoms in the Charter, and it does so in a way that the Charter allows. The Charter provides an escape hatch in exceptional circumstances, and that is not by accident: it is by design. And anyone who would design the Charter without this escape hatch probably has no business being in governance, because it would just be a ticking time bomb to a constitutional crisis.
Same act that imprisoned Japanese citizens that was slightly changed. Legally the government could make you a slave and it wouldn't violate your charter.
You don't have as many rights or protections as you believe. You don't even have property rights in Canada.
Not the best example. We live in a society that intentionally infected 600 African American men with syphilis, without their consent, simply to see what happens despite knowing effective treatment already existed. Nice concept indeed.
Irrelevant to a response regarding both the importance of human rights and the spread of syphilis? I can't imagine an instance where it would be more relevant, I'd be interested to hear why it's not though.
The topic of discussion is the limits on human rights that can reasonably arise to protect the public from real harm.
What you're throwing into the mix is a suspension of human rights for... unethical research? Failing to see the distinction is really not something I can help you with.
What I've thrown into the mix is a suspension of human rights that was claimed to be for the purpose of protection but in reality caused harm. It wasn't simply "unethical research." If HIV and Syphilis are the best examples of reasons to suspend human rights then we are lacking in good examples. Far more often than not, human rights are a form of protection and their suspension is a guise for causing harm.
This is the problem with people who think like you. You see someone say "there can be good reasons to suspend rights in exceptional circumstances" and you just go and find an example of a terrible justification to suspend rights (sometimes with an outright evil or cruel motivation), as if it was the same thing.
When I used the example of STIs, I was alluding to things like how the "duty to report" [1] and the criminalization of very limited and targeted behaviours [2] have the effect of narrowing very specific rights in very specific circumstances. These are policies that are reasonable and that generally are designed to limit rights and freedoms as little as possible in order to achieve a particular goal. We're not talking about suspending rights just because it's "convenient", and I wasn't alluding to using humans as guinea pigs for unethical research programmes... I don't know what you were thinking.
You apparently don't see the difference, but that doesn't mean you have special insight-- if anything, it just means you're confused about the principles at play (or, perhaps more charitably, you're assuming that I'm a fool and are misinterpreting what I'm saying).
^ The provided links are US-centred (because I'm assuming most readers are American) but one can easily find very similar policies in Canada or almost any other developed country.
I recognize that you were not trying to allude to the countless times where the limitation of rights were used to cause harm. I also recognize that good and bad justifications are not the same thing. My thinking is simply that there are better examples than Syphilis and HIV, such as seat belts or speed limits. What I saw you say was "You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases" and I'm saying that is a poor example of justification for such limitations because:
1) The listener might be disease-free regardless of society's efforts (the limitation's benefit might not be relatable)
2) We live in a society that actively spreads diseases in the name of protection and profit (the justification behind limitations might be engineered)
3) These diseases still exist in unknown quantities (the limitations might be ineffective)
A better example would be something like seat belts or speed limits because:
1) The listener is far more likely to have been in or around a vehicle than they are to have contracted syphilis. (the limitation's benefit is relatable)
2) There are no instances of seat belts or speed limits having been used to justify excessive harm. (the limitation's benefit cannot be argued as having been engineered)
3) The impact on safety is far easier to measure and compare. (the limitation's effectiveness can be measured immediately)
But if you don't believe any of this to be relevant, then I must accept that. Thank you for your time.
1) it's exactly the type of infectious disease that public health experts deal with routinely. See the first link I provided for a long list of others.
2) it's not an "extreme" concern in the sense that there's no real danger of syphillis posing an immediate existential threat: it's a very mundane example
3) there are limitations on rights today, in most developed countries, centred around the chosen example. There are tradeoffs in place today which, similarly to seatbelts, are generally well tolerated by society.
4) it is in some sense better than the seatbelt example because it involves population dynamics (exponential growth and all the models we must make use of to make well-informed policy decisions), which are a different beast. Seatbelt behaviour is linear and has an individual blast radius. Infectious diseases are non-linear and have a collective blast radius.
There's a reason there was no trucker convoy protest over seatbelt laws: people were panicking because they didn't know anything about infectious diseases and didn't understand the motivation for taking public health action. It's an almost-classic case of fear of the unknown, and yet there were always similar types of measures in plain sight.
You’re wrong. All accounts have been unfrozen. They were frozen for less than 2 weeks. Stop spreading misinformative nonsense for you political agenda. This is not the platform for it.
> The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes.
It's constantly been peaking and collapsing since 2013, when there were no US interest rate increases. The 2017 peak happened in the middle of a US interest rate increase cycle. The 2021 peak happened 6 months before the most recent US interest rate increase cycle. I'm sure interest rates were varying in other countries on different schedules, but blaming a crypto market collapse on interest rate hikes doesn't seem to square with the data.
Yeah but institutional investors were just starting to hold much larger positions within the last few years. They are much more sensitive to interest rate hikes than individuals.
I would assume that as long as the returns are greater than the interest rates, institutional investors are less sensitive than individuals to interest rate hikes.
> The 2017 peak happened in the middle of a US interest rate increase cycle. The 2021 peak happened 6 months before the most recent US interest rate increase cycle
Denominate the Bitcoin market cap in US M1 money supply. You will then see that it peaked in 2017, 2019, and 2021 (twice). This ratio also bottomed recently.
Effectively, when the central bank that manages the word's reserve currency starts printing money (or there is an anticipation of printing), Bitcoin appreciates. The opposite happens during tightening (ie rate hikes).
In recent years, you can argue that bitcoin has acted as a canary in the coal mine. Bitcoins chart is pretty much the same as stocks (especially tech/growth stocks). It just moves slightly ahead of stocks sometimes.
Money flows out of equities and into bonds which yield a higher more dependable return when interest rates are high enough.
The equities market was already running at artificially inflated values for some sectors (like technology), which means there isn't much growth potential (if everything is deemed to be already overpriced), and so the outflows were quite significant from those sectors, accentuating the inverse relationship between equities and interest rates.
I would argue that cryptos are typically not equities; they're usually either commodities (cryptocurrency) or some sort of non-current intangible asset (NFTs). The exception would be things like shares in the DAO, which, while interesting, is not typically what people have in mind when they say "crypto" these days.
I can't say for sure, but I think cryptos are actually behaving a bit more like precious metals, in that people use them as speculative store of value - so a bit like you say, commodities.
The other thing that surprises me is the sheer number of currencies that currently exist - I had thought there would be a massive shake-out in the market but so far they seem to be multiplying like fungus.
That’s a good model. Gold and diamonds actually have industrial applications, but those price signals are lost in the noise of fashion and speculation. If they were suddenly unpopular, prices would drop, but not to zero.
Crypto is not an equity, but it trades like one (specifically like a tech meme stock) as of late. It peeked in Nov 2021 just like tech stocks, and has come down roughly a similar amount.
Interest rates in Argentina have been on an upward trend for the last decade [1], yet bitcoin is near its all time high relative to the Peso [2]. How do you explain the contradiction here?
The claim is higher interest rates cause things to collapse.
US interest rate go up, bitcoin go down!
Argentina interest rate go up, bitcoin go up!
Contradiction.
What you pointed out tho is important: fiat is a confidence game at the end of the day, and it doesn't matter how much yield a fiat offers if it lacks confidence.
Bitcoin is more or less a measure of how much confidence people have in their respective fiat currencies.
We've seen a lot of growth over the past decades, so it should be easy to retire at 30, but we're being told to work longer, be more productive, and die sooner. So where is that all growth? something doesn't add up.
Is that a rhetorical question? It flows to the 1%. Current levels of wealth inequality are unprecedented in American history. We work hard to support the lavish lifestyles of the rich.
If we could combine today's technology with 1970s levels of wealth equality, we could probably retire in 1970s level comfort by the time we reach age 40.
It's a hedge against currency debasement. And it hedged pretty well against that! From the moment M2 supply increased (Feb 2020) to the moment M2 began decreasing(jan 2022), bitcoin earned you almost 400%.
Take a look at Bitcoin. It's up 80% from the recent bottom.
NVDA is up 140% for similar reasons: the market anticipates the tightening cycle is over.
It's up more than Bitcoin because of the AI narrative. It's also possible money is moving out of bank stocks (compare to KRE or XLF), small/mid-cap stocks (compare to IWM), and other semiconductor stocks (compare to SMH). This trend could mean-revert into the new quarter.
The comment I was originally addressing was about the decline, not the rally.
We could go back and forth for days on whether cryptocurrencies have done anything for society, but it's already been discussed ad infinitum both here on HN and elsewhere.
I only wanted to point out that this article is inane.
Crypto is a technology that offers just one thing: electronic payments without anything unneessary bundled with it. Crypto is a model of what banking should be.
For comparison, to use a bank card you first need to provide all your details to bank which can share them with anyone they want, and then your application can be rejected for arbitrary reasons. And after this again the bank can share information about anything you bought with the card. There is even an official organization for sharing data about consumers loan history and this is totally not a crime in our weird society.
It is quite a very poor use with such "crime" happening all on a public and transparent blockchain, making it very easy to trace all of that (even if they use a tumbler / mixer) with the funds certainly seized and frozen as soon as it hits the exchange.
In fact criminals and scammers still use banks and Zelle to facilitate their criminal enterprise - [0] [1] in the trillions of dollars.
Perhaps they want to get themselves traced on a public ledger and to join the long list of gangs caught and arrested by the authorities each week?
Once again, Bitcoin is worse for scammers, criminals and ransomware than using Zelle and the banks for fraud.
You should be asking why the banks continue to move trillions of dollars of illicit funds for criminals for years without them doing anything. Same with Zelle.
Sadly there are many more simple minded people like this than people who understand nuance and know that legal doesn't always equal right. Even more terrifying, people like this can vote.
You live in a bubble if you think projects working on blockchains as Ethereum or Bitcoin are only used for crime. USD is still the #1 FIAT used for crime.
Bullshit, they existed both before the crypto and before the Internet itself. It's just a bit more convenient, but otherwise it's just the same as it was: give money to one man, take money/goods from other man and how exactly they settle their accounts is none of your business.
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it" --Jean de La Fontaine.
With sufficient tracking of non-cryptocurrencies and physical goods governments could largely kill dark net markets by making it too hard to buy anything physical with your cryptocurrency. Imagine KYC but applied to every transaction instead of just large ones.
Making dark markets too easy isn't a win for personal liberty. Its a step on the road to a dystopia with little personal liberty or privacy because every time something seriously bad happens a few due to dark markets that would not have been possible in the legal markets the general public will demand something be done about it, which will result in government being granted more power.
One of the things I hadn’t considered in the beginning is that it is also a large conversion of resources and power into computation and heat.
Fundamentally, that’s a kind of transfer of wealth in and of itself. My favorite examples were people with subsidized electric bills who kinda scored on that arbitrage until everyone wised up.
Right, but _they_ are also are also firmly planted within the fiat monetary system. Ultimately their will be a socially defined singular cryptographic definition of economic value at some point in the future.
You're kinda right but it's also kinda right that after a decade+ crypto found like 1.5 useful applications and generative AI is finding some mind blowing product launch or demo something like once every 8 hours.
It's not a race. One technology can show its value more quickly than another, and one technology can ultimately provide more value to society than another. That doesn't mean that the other technology is useless, just that it developed more slowly and/or ended up having a lesser overall impact.
I think it's worth putting into perspective though that machine learning kicked off in the 60s, whereas there wasn't any notable progress on the byzantine generals problem until 2009 (and even the concept of proof-of-work wasn't formalized until 1993). Distributed ledger technology is still relatively young compared to machine learning.
I think the comparison is useful to folks trying to wrap their head around the hype; it's natural to ask "is this crypto all over again" and the answer is very clearly no.
IMO since crypto is a newer technology than AI, I think it's more relevant to ask whether crypto is "AI all over again".
AI has followed the classic Gartner hype cycle [1]. There was the trigger in the 1960s-90s, the peak of inflated expectations in 2000-2010 with every other company bragging about "AI this" or "machine learning that" while having nothing of any use to show for it, then finally the "slope of enlightenment" from the 2010s-present where AI is actually becoming useful to people in their everyday lives.
Crypto may be on the way out - or - it may be following a similar curve on a shifted timeline. For example: Trigger in 2009, peak of inflated expectations 2017 (cryptokitties), trough of disillusionment 2017-2030, slope of enlightenment 2030-2040.
Modern AI is less than ten years old. Digital money is older than crypto.
PyTorch: Initial release
September 2016; 6 years ago
Tensorflow: Initial release
November 9, 2015; 7 years ago
> In 1983, a research paper titled "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" by David Chaum introduced the idea of digital cash.
> The first artificial neural network was invented in 1958 by psychologist Frank Rosenblatt.
In the limit, the dates don't really matter. I'd wager both fields have had roughly the same human capital afforded to them - I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.
Neural networks really only had a scaling problem to overcome, and most people knew it. What's the technical problem with crypto?
It's odd that you're willing to go back to 1983 for a single paper but ignoring all the AI work in the 70s/80s - marvin minsky and the perceptron are literally 1970s tech.
Applying your same "modern AI is less than 10 years old", modern cryptocurrency really dates no older than Bitcoin. That took off say maybe 2010-12 or so, while the AI research was really kicking off around 2012-2014.
They're roughly the same age on both scales, Bitcoin is probably a bit older than modern AI and AI fundamentals are probably a bit older than cryptocurrency fundamentals, it sounds like. But this is arguing about 2 years +/- for the modern stuff and 5y +/- for the 70s/80s stuff.
* The waste of Proof Of Work (in terms of both on-chain economics and off-chain externalities). Introduced in 2009, solved in 2023 with Ethereum's final Proof Of Stake update (earlier if you look at smaller cryptos or if you count Ethereum's half-finished PoS algo starting in 2020).
* The inability to scale transaction throughput. Became a problem with Bitcoin in 2015, partially solved by Ethereum in 2022 with Layer 2 chains, to be fully solved in 2024-2027 with data availability sampling and generalized zero knowledge roll-ups.
* The inability to reach quick finality. Bitcoin provided 30 to 60 minute probabilistic finality. Ethereum provided similar probabilistic finality with much more predictability. Ethereum's PoS update gave it 15-minute economic finality. Future updates promise 12-second on-chain economic finality. Zero knowledge rollups promise instant economic finality.
* Miner extractable value (MEV). Too deep a topic to get into here, but it's a problem that plagues existing public smart contracts and that has solutions (like proposer-builder separation) that are currently in concept phase (2-5 years until wide implementation).
* History and state expiry. Basically, the ability for a blockchain to prune very old data that is no longer needed to keep consensus. 3-5 years out imo. This will allow for blockchains that don't constantly grow in size the longer they run.
> I'd wager both fields have had roughly the same human capital afforded to them
Highly unlikely. AI received massive government funding. Digital cash not so much. There are thousands of labs studying AI, not so with digital cash. Also digital cash is just one use case, there wasn't efforts towards a generic blockchain in those days.
I mean, I'm not trying to be "fair" to AI vs Crypto or predict the long future or analyze the distant past; a lot of folks may have given crypto way more immediate attention than they ultimately feel had a good payoff for them, and wonder if if all this AI hype will also be nothing but hype for the next many years, or if they should in fact devote their immediate attention to it.
If you're comparing modern machine learning with what was going on in the 60s, the two are so different that you should be comparing crypto to financial exchange technologies in general if you want to make an honest comparison.
Also, if we're starting the counter at the kind of AI that existed in the 60s, there were already hundreds of use cases by the 90s (which is the timeline you're proposing)
Bitcoin is trading at 28k. When the dollar is endlessly printed, all you need to do is not sell your bitcoin and eventually you'll come out ahead. Because the dollar supply is infinite, it is not zero-sum.
This is an interesting observation. Governments officially support inflation, i.e. stealing your hard earned money (as stealing money seem to be better for economy) and you cannot do anything with it.
Wasn’t Nvidia trying to block cryptomining a year or two ago so they could sell to their core target markets in peace?
It seems difficult to reconcile “we’re actively trying to stop cryptominers from buying our product” actions with “we’re against cryptomining only because they’re not buying our product” views.
What the other commenters are missing is that Nvidia is not purely a hardware business, they make a lot of money on gaming partnerships, GeForce Ultimate, and other secondary software subscriptions that miners do not pay for but gamers do. That's why they attempted to restrict mining with their GPUs, because they can get recurring revenue from gamers.
the GPU mining booms in 2014 and 2017 showed that nobody can keep up even without supply-chain disruptions.
the demand for machines that turn a quarter into a dollar is effectively infinite. It is always rational to turn $0.99 into $1, only bounded by the risk that you can't do that in the future and the machine loses its value. But as there are more machines in the market, that $0.25 starts to approach the $0.99 return, because mining rewards are distributed across more GPUs so each has less expected return.
(and this is ignoring some weird effects like some miners being willing to run at a loss due to stolen electricity/using it to move money past currency controls/etc)
So in effect cryptomining has this super weird demand curve where the demand is infinite for the bottom and middle parts of the curve, then as you pass the break-even point it actually reverses, and suddenly you're left with miners selling a bunch of used GPUs that undercut all the inventory you geared up to produce at 2x your normal sellthrough.
It's not just a normal supply curve because the demand is literally infinite, there's no "I have enough toilet paper to last a lifetime", the answer to how many money-printing-machines I want is always "all of them", as long as they're all profitable. And again, they're a durable good and when the demand becomes negative your customers will sell them all again and flood your market again.
Literally the only way to cope with that is an instantaneous supply chain - you need to be able to produce enough GPUs to immediately saturate demand and push to the "nobody makes any profit anymore" stage of the curve. But that's not possible in silicon fabrication even in a perfectly ideal scenario - you are doing really well if (like NVIDIA) you can gear up to produce 2x your usual production. There just isn't enough VRAM production on the planet to produce 100x your normal quantity for 2 months, let alone the GPUs themselves. And then you'd have to ramp it all immediately back down too.
And even then, once miners are done they flip all that production back into the secondhand market (often with higher defect rates, the current batch are suffering from GPU cores that explode due to moisture from when miners powerwashed them, as well as memory failing due to prolonged high-temperature operation, and miners are repainting markings on dies to obscure this).
You can't build a supply chain to support that. It's not physically possible. Again, 2014 and 2017 showed this. And the inventory overhangs in 2015 and 2018 showed this too.
The only answer is to get miners onto their own line of products so that it doesn't starve the rest of the market for 2 years and then snap back and flood the market with excess inventory (both unsold and secondhand). People really don't like the idea of being told what they can do with their cards but you can't balance a supply chain around crypto boom/bust cycles, it is not physically possible.
Mining during your spare time is a consolation prize for GPUs being unaffordable, it just gets you back to where you started. And we are now seeing the downside of the inventory overhang resulting from mining - both AMD and NVIDIA are slow-walking the new generation to let existing inventory (mostly NVIDIA) burn through. And that happened in 2018 too.
Ethereum is done for now, but I am in the camp that there will likely be more PoW coins that evolve in the 5+ year timeframe and put us back into the same situation. NVIDIA needs to put perfcounters on their cores that look at alignment and memory coalescing. If ~0% of your memory accesses are aligned and ~0% are coalesced that's highly likely to be a mining workload, since everybody else at least tries to align/coalesce to benefit from higher effective bandwidth, but this is inherently impossible in proof-of-work algorithms since the algorithm is supposed to be making inherently random, unpredictable access patterns. So you can detect kernels that are doing inherently unaligned work, and back that up with a whitelist from the driver of things that you know are good (validated via TPM that the driver hasn't been tampered), and slow down everything not on that list that seems like a mining workload.
And I mean slow down significantly, not just slow down 50%. NVIDIA wasn't interested in stopping mining, they only slowed themselves down to the same level as AMD so they wouldn't be preferentially sucked off the shelves.
And it turns out the secondhand dumps from miners aren't particularly cheap either, and didn't magically give us 3080s too cheap to meter. I said before that people often didn't do the math in the 2017 boom either, prices really only dropped about 30% from pre-boom prices (which were already significantly below launch MSRP - 480 4GB/8GB were $150/175 ish in early 2017, 1080 was down to low $400s, etc). It's tough to get a read on what a "true" pre-boom price is for Ampere/RDNA2 since they launched during the pandemic, supply issues, and really into the start of the mining boom ramp-up, there isn't a good reference. But I think that "roughly 30% below the 'true' baseline" figure has held pretty true.
(and again, the miners did dump, that's why there's GPUs with the dies exploding because they powerwashed them! they're also even making their way back into the supply chain as new/refurbished at times, because a powerwashed and remarked GPU looks pretty dang clean!)
Sort of. My opinion is that the "we love gamers, partners please stop selling to miners" and the LHR limiter were both virtue signaling.
What was a legitimate problem was being preferentially sucked off shelves by miners. When NVIDIA was 2x as good as AMD, and it led to NVIDIA cards being priced 2x as high as AMD, that was a problem. And that was happening - prices lined up perfectly according to hashrate, and AMD cards had lower hashrates because they had narrower memory buses and infinity cache didn't help mining. They were taking heat in tech media for failure to control prices/get supply under control (despite roughly 2x'ing their usual production) and potentially losing users to AMD
Solution: drop the hash rate by half. Now you are no longer preferentially being sucked off shelves and LHR cards should approximate the price of their AMD counterparts. You don't lose out on miner sales completely, but you're not disproportionately affected. And if there is a bust, you are both equally affected then too.
So it wasn't a fullhearted "we want miners OUT of the gaming market". If that was the case you'd have slowed it down by like 90-95%. They were happy to have the sales from miners, they just didn't want to suffer a competitive disadvantage relative to AMD due to miners gobbling up inventory.
I am not quite sure what to make out of the mining cards side of the equation. They have done this at least twice now (P104 mining cards, etc) but they never seem to lean into it fully in the sense of really shunting inventory heavily towards mining. And yet they know that a lot of gaming cards are being sold to miners, including big direct-to-farm sales from partners (who love it because it's bulk and they force the farms to disclaim the warranty).
Perhaps it's an artifact of how it's really partners doing the ordering of products (including mining cards - those are all sold via partners not direct from NVIDIA). If they're ordered as gaming chips you get gaming chips, and partners may not want to take the risk of leaning into mining too hard. Maybe if there was a harsher mining limiter it might force partners to actually make a choice on it instead of fence-sitting with gaming inventory, who knows.
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On the other hand that strategy kind of missed in that AMD simply opted not to participate in the GPU market, when consoles were eating up 80% of their wafers off the top and the CPU market could shift their remaining wafers at 10x the margin of GPUs. See my other comment about the impossible boom/bust cycle of GPUs and AMD's answer is: simply don't participate in the GPU market during this cycle.
It took almost a full year for any of the 6000 series cards to show up in Steam Hardware Survey at a mere 0.15%. NVIDIA had 7-8% of the market being 30-series around the same point - and I doubt 30-series are being used in LAN cafes in china, that is a 1060/1650 phenomenon not one that hits all cards equally. And actually 6700XT rapidly overtook all three of the higher cards combined. AMD just barely made any of the 6800/6800XT/6900 series at all, for the first year.
You can't blame them when one $649-MSRP 6800XT with 520mm^2 of silicon and $200-300 of other BOM cost, could be sold as six 5800X processors (81mm^2 CCD, GloFo 12nm IO die) each with an MSRP of $449, or as 3/4 of an Epyc 64C that sells for $10k MSRP, with essentially no BOM cost. You are talking about selling the same piece of silicon for $200, $2700, or $7500, it's not a hard choice to make. And they could absolutely sell the CPUs at or above MSRP, and that's after cranking MSRP and dropping value SKUs already. So they did a token launch (as late as possible) to satisfy their legal obligation to investors and went and made some fucking money, and simply chose not to participate in the GPU bubble this time.
Increasingly I think the discrete GPU market is just a backstop for AMD. It's a place to soak up excess wafers if they order too much for CPUs and Epyc, and it's a slush fund of wafers if they have unexpected demand from CPUs and Epyc and consoles. It's not something they put an R&D focus on (a major chunk of RNDA1 and RDNA2's early-stage R&D were largely funded by Sony and MS) and it's not something they put first in their manufacturing priority. It's also why they're lagging on the features side of the equation - consoles are paying for the R&D and consoles don't care about tensor cores or video encoder quality or optical flow engines, and won't pay for it in their chips or even fund the R&D.
dGPUs are just a sponge to soak up any excess in the rest of the business, or squeeze a little extra out of. Not a focus anymore. Maybe that changes if they're the first to multi-GCD and have a real shot to win, but, in the current scenario they get 80% of the revenue for 20% of the effort and that's what they're doing.
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Now the other side of the "AMD simply chose not to participate in the GPU market" coin: it's all still a single market and AMD has to wait for the inventory to burn off too, even if it's NVIDIA inventory. OEMs like Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, etc aren't buying RDNA3 GPUs for their beige boxes or laptops if they have a bunch of Ampere sitting around, even if AMD inventory isn't high itself. Same for the secondary market, it doesn't matter if you are selling new RDNA3 cards if there are a bunch of used miner cards at great prices and people are buying used instead of new. It's all one market.
Some of the drop in marketshare despite deep price cuts is due to exactly this: OEMs aren't buying right now. Not buying anyone, but what's sitting in their stockpile is NVIDIA cards. And AMD can't make the big deals with OEMs that make up the majority of the market - the DIY market is a fraction of the overall market and AMD is selling great there (see: mindfactory numbers) due to aggressive pricing, but OEMs had piles of Ampere they need to get rid of. JPR did have some errors in the last set of numbers but still, the numbers for AMD are not great even then and that's the reason IMO, it's not DIY sales it's OEM sales.
I think the fact that they launched laptop Navi 33 in January but delayed the desktop until June is due to this: it's an inventory problem, and there is a lot of dGPU inventory still piled up. Not theirs, but that doesn't really matter.
> No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to mine it with GPUs. Crypto obviously does not "need parallel processing" in the way that Nvidia GPUs provide it, because Ethereum removed that requirement entirely.
Absolutely correct.
At least cryptocurrencies like Ethereum found an alternative consensus method that is efficient and environmentally friendly, unlike what I am seeing in AI and deep neural networks for decades which that still has not changed with the way on how models continue to get larger and require more planet incinerating power and will currently require millions and in the future, billions of dollars to train. As long as they stay inefficient, Nvidia will continue smiling knowing that.
The end result is a pseduo-intelligent black box that confidently hallucinates and can get confused by a single bad input - rendering it useless. Once it all goes wrong, then it gets re-trained / fine-tuned again, wasting more energy. Inference requiring tons of GPUs is also wasteful and inefficient.
The moment we switch to better and efficient alternative in training deep neural networks at scale, that I would call a 'breakthrough' in AI rather than throwing more data, more GPUs at the problem.
> unlike what I am seeing in AI and deep neural networks for decades which that still has not changed with the way on how models continue to get larger and require more planet incinerating power and will currently require millions and in the future, billions. As long as they stay inefficient, Nvidia will continue smiling knowing that.
What are you talking about? The inaccessibility of the models and the heavy gatekeeping by the big players is leading to more and more open source models that can run on an average gaming GPU or a Mac M1. It seems like every day on HN there is another post on another super-optimized version of something that was once only accessible to those with huge server farms or cloud budgets. You're seeing announcements like Stanford's Alpaca that specifically mention how it can run on low-budget commodity hardware or a few hundred dollars in the cloud.
I'd say efficiency and optimization is one of the hottest areas in large language models right now, although the motivation is less for climate reasons and more for 'I want to do this on my own hardware and have no safety censors' reasons.
I'm convinced that with the efforts you speak of we're seeing history repeat itself (as it often does).
In the late 90s/early 2000s when the internet/web was really picking up steam powerful and entrenched players like Microsoft were throwing their weight around and trying to dominate the space like they did personal computers. Ditto Sun, etc.
Then the open source community got together and ate their lunch. Who remembers Netcraft statistics for Windows + IIS vs Linux + Apache?
OpenAI, Meta, Google, to some extent Nvidia, etc are doing their best to go the closed/commercial/proprietary/gated/costly route (again) - and open source is already hitting back hard against all of these and as has been shown before, starting to catch-up/outpace them at incredible speed.
China's 2021 ban didn't affect the crypto industry in any real way. Mining operations moved from China to the USA, a few irrelevant Chinese companies shuttered, and the industry continued business as usual.
The most influential crypto companies were already incorporated in the west.
I wasn't referring to the demand for units of cryptocurrency on particular networks. I was referring to actual industry, i.e. the companies that are researching, improving, and selling the technology itself.
Well, China's ban didn't negatively affect global demand enough that any relevant companies closed up shop. Just reporting to you what happened.
Most of these blockchain R&D companies (and their investors) are still in the bootstrapping phase anyways. They're looking ahead 3+ years before they expect their product to go parabolic, so the actions of one or two governments in the mean time is just noise.
I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position.
With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life.
Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".
With every indirection the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added which just fuels my sense of a system driven by amoral technocrats.
Maybe at the beginning. Right now they're all just trying to replicate the current system with less regulations and with them at the top, nothing punk about it.
I was going to correct you by saying "if you didn't intend the pun, you should have used 'aether' (or 'æther' if you're cool)" but in going to the Wikipedia article to copypaste the "æ", I learned that "alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether", which was enough news to me that I felt it worth commenting. Fair play!
> Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".
Your way of "making yourself heard" is to trade your real dollars for digital dollars?
The thing about cryptocurrencies is that you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed. Sure, you could argue that maybe at some future point the governments could possibly all band together and shut down every on-ramp to cryptocurrency, but that's extremely unlikely to happen universally across the globe. As long as some country, somewhere, allows cryptocurrency purchases then there will be a way to use them.
The narrative that you have to invest in cryptocurrency to stick it to the government is really just consumerism being applied liberally by people who want the price of their crypto to go up.
> you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed
"As needed" is an interesting phrase. I'd argue that what we need from cryptocurrency is for it to move past the current phase where the only consensus it bothers with is account balances.
We need consensus about things that will help us collectively act to keep powerful entities like governments in check. As it stands, they're very good at dividing us against one another.
If you end up making some fiat along the way, that's fine, but the return on an investment in crypto is a world where the powerful are well-behaved because they're scared that the rest of us will turn our backs on the abstractions that give them power.
As it stands, that's not a credible threat, so it's reasonable to make investments that'll take things in the direction (which is, sadly, not the effect of most crypto investing).
If you re-frame money as essentially a form of speech then 'making yourself heard' makes sense. The medium becomes the message. DeFi as the ideal, not top-down government to control the money supply with sketchy all-seeing-eye masonic symbols on the banknotes.
DeFI cannot coexist with either OFAC or AML in the picture.
Those are the fundamental roots of money as a top-down control mechanism. Those functions alone are responsible for making the finance sector a de-facto extension of the United States Government and an effective extension of Law Enforcement.
HN is weirdly inconsistent about digital currencies. Generally pro encryption, net neutrality, open-source software, VPNs, etc. But mention "Bitcoin," and suddenly half the commenters lose their shit about the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.
Then they go back to commiserating with another Ask HN startup founder whose PayPal account was frozen.
> I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life.
That, and I'd also like everyone to know that money, markets, and everything are a joke. The value of USD is just what people collectively agree on it to be, not some inherent fundamental value. The same is true for TSLA stock, GME stock, ethereum, or the shitcoin-of-the-week.
Pretending that there aren't fundamentals behind the USD is ridiculous.
How do those people collectively agree on the value of the USD? By looking at the fundamentals - the economy of the US, the stability of its government, the likelihood that it will make good on its bonds.
None of those factors establish a fundamental market price for the dollar - you're simply listing the price of admission for any state-backed currency.
The dollar has declined in value by over 90% since 1933. By your metrics that must mean that the US is in catastrophic meltdown, but of course it isn't.
Theoretically, a stock's fair value is the sum of their current and (discounted) future earnings.
> Many times stocks perform well at earnings and shareholders still put on a fit and downvote its price.
Price fluctuations at earnings calls are due to relative earnings expectations, not the absolute value of the earnings itself. Such stock revaluation is due to investors suddenly having more accurate earnings figures to price into their valuation.
> Conversely, they often upvote its price based on some PR hype instead of actual earnings.
"PR hype" pumps represent increased market expectations of actual future earnings, however tenuous those expectations may be.
Right - it should be the logical pivot for anyone previously operating in the cryptocurrency space (assuming they weren't just in it for perceived profit potential...)
While I worked on cryptocurrencies and have changed to primarily focus on secure, private, anonymous network protocols (because the potential for speculative abuse is less, giving credit to your suggestion), I still would like to say that this is an example of whataboutism.
Money is power in a distinct way that freedom of information, in general, is not:
You don't need to believe in a (digital crypto) currency for it to hold value:
As long as someone else believes it, you can make them do things for that currency.
I believe this potency is what makes the scum of the Earth flock to cryptocurrencies.
It is not clear to me that there is any reasonable way to implement a truly permissionless and secure decentralized anonymous protocol without using programmatic money as you need some way to fairly allocate resources. Hell: if you stare into the soul of Bittorrent long enough trying to figure out how to make it worth your while to seed unpopular files you realize that it is essentially just digital barter screaming for a way to store and transfer your good will, letting all the seeding you did on prior files help you download this new one... and, well: welcome to capitalism.
I was working on decentralized systems back as early as 2001--notably, well before Bitcoin existed--and it frankly seemed just as true back then and we didn't even know how or if it was going to be possible for anyone to make the money part work. In 2009, when Bitcoin came out, I was too busy working on my federated iOS app store alternative for it to sink in what had happened as I remember barely taking note of Bitcoin and later not taking enough note when people tried to show it to me that something important had been figured out. I am sad that I saw people I even knew working on Ethereum and still didn't join the efforts until 2017.
But like, with permissionless systems, and when all the participants are anonymous, you have a really serious problem of how to deal with freeriders and spam. To the extent to which prior attempts at such protocols have worked they either are run by centralized cabals (Tor and its ~10 directory servers managed by Roger Dingledine and his friends), is based on barter and has severe / obvious limits on its applicability (Bittorrent), or--and this is the biggest category by far--only works because it is so niche and/or new that no one has so far decided to attack it (or, worse: someone did attack it, the attack worked, but the protocol is so niche that the people who built the protocol don't actually give a shit as the attacks aren't happening in practice... this is the situation with I2P). Hell: email has even become more and more centralized and less possible to remain anonymous, in no small part due to spam.
At best, you see people try to build a kind of reputation management system based on your IPv4 address, under the assumption that those are scarce. In fact, despite Tor being largely centralized (on the aforementioned directory services run by Roger Dingledine and his friends) it also relies heavily on IPv4 address scarcity as they don't know all of the server administrators (though Roger Dingledine does claim to "personally have met" 2/3rds of them, which I find more terrifying than relieving). This, though, only really works if you use a slow accumulation whitelist model (which is how Tor manages their high-risk exit nodes) as otherwise your protocol kind of becomes irrelevant in a world of IPv6 (which Tor has in fact struggled with, though they have better options here due to the design of the directory server cabal).
Regardless, if you are building up reputation surrounding IP addresses, you know what you aren't? Anonymous (because an IP address is a location tied to a user; and, if you are able to borrow someone else's IP address, its reputation is going to be poor, almost by definition). And, sure... that's sort of OK for some kinds of protocols: in the case of Tor, you want the users to be anonymous while the servers don't at all have to be (and, in a very real sense, can't) and so they can use this largely-centralized design for the list of servers to slowly build trust in new operators whose reputation they manage by their indirect identity, and then hopefully the users can be anonymous, right? (...Right?)
But like, the users being anonymous only sort of works on Tor because the users are by-and-large actively choosing to not be brats: the servers are donating resources and they are donating it to a cause, not because they are bored; and so, if you sit around using their bandwidth and good will to do nothing more interesting than stream YouTube videos all day--as a user in the United States who is not blocked from accessing YouTube or anything--you are considered to be abusing a scarce resource and people who find out try to make you feel bad. Maybe it works? But the result undermines the premise: everyone who uses Tor is supposedly someone who needs to use Tor, which means the FBI can and in fact did (as part of XKeyScore) just flag people who go to Tor's website for extra diligence.
If you wanted the worlds' Internet traffic to flow through it, with every user using much more bandwidth from the system than it costs them to send (as their bandwidth gets amplified as it goes through multiple other nodes) you need a way to dole out this resource in a fair way, building some kind of market for the resource; and, I totally do appreciate this answer kind of sucks, but the decentralized way to build a market is... capitalism, using some kind of money to compensate people for their efforts. You will find a similar need in any decentralized system to prevent bad actors from just monopolizing all of the resources (well, unless you decide to use an IP-based reputation management scheme... which would again undermine the point).
(Note: I work on a system designed to make this eventually work in the specific case of an actually-fully decentralized market-based Tor-like mechanism. No: it isn't something I am sufficiently proud of right now to want to sit around arguing whether the thing that we deployed fully solved the problem: I am just going to say we made a lot of impact and progress and leave it at that for today... however, I am still working on this problem space, I already know how to make this stuff better, but I have been distracted with personal issues... maybe you'll see something dramatic from me in the near future. But like, I frankly see no way of making anything even similar work without money in the design; and, if you do, then I beg of you to drop everything you are doing and either build it or tell others how to build it as the world needs to have decentralized protocols and the reason almost all of the decentralized protocol design has moved into crypto is not merely because it is lucrative: it is because, for the first time, it actually feels possible there.)
But so like, I essentially dare you to show me any decentralized protocol that allows anonymous users to permissionlessly participate even if they are actively trying to gobble up resources and even if they simply hate the protocol and chose to implement it incorrectly. That Bitcoin worked was a watershed moment in this space, and it did it by starting with the idea of using capitalism to solve a kind of lazy version of the consensus problem. It isn't the be-all-and-end-all of designs and it has a lot of holes, and yet it is still working despite a ridiculous number of people trying to use it at the same time and a number of people actively wishing it didn't exist. Did it get expensive at times? Yes. But did it just turn into a bunch of worthless spam? No. Have people managed to shut it down? Not yet! And later designs have been attempting to iterate on the mechanism by adding more functionality (such as Ethereum, upon which my team was able to deploy a probabilistic nanopayments mechanism similar to the centralized Internet startup PepperCoin) or increasing the performance (I had been particularly enamored with Avalanche). There are parallel tracks designed to improve the privacy and anonymity (such as Zcash).
This is, in all honesty, the future of decentralized systems. And yes: the existence of money as one of the early essential primitives means that for every iota of progress there are people who just try to cash in on the whole thing... but I watched this space take a full decade before anyone even figured out how to build a decentralized currency, and the progress suddenly made since then has been dramatic, with people figuring out how to build any number of decentralized alternatives to centralized systems that previously would have been unheard of... even if you want to poo poo it all because it is "hard to use" or "costs more", the fact that it works is amazing and should be inspiring.
Tor relies on the IPv4 scarcity to make Sybil attacks more expensive but is slowly moving away from it e.g. the number of allowed relays per IP was recently doubled from 2 to 4 and it may get doubled in the near future again.
>Roger Dingledine does claim to "personally have met" 2/3rds of them
Hey said that he knew 2/3 in the beginning so 10 years+ ago and that it's no longer the case but he would like to increase the number of relay operator he or others of the Tor Project knows again. There are in person relay operator meetups at conferences (e.g Chaos Communication Congress) and I assume that he met most of the people at such occasions. I'm not sure why this should be terrifying.
>whitelist model (which is how Tor manages their high-risk exit nodes)
I'm not sure if this ever was the case but exit nodes aren't threatened specially than other relays and there is no whitelist model for them.
FWIW, he had told me that five years ago. I fully admit 5 is as close to 10 as it is to 0, though ;P. But like, even if he was stuck using an old stat the idea that he wants to know all of them isn't confidence inspiring from this angle. I asked him what he would do if someone came to him with a lead pipe and threatened him with a demand to poison his directory server and he seemed confident until I asked him the same question about his family and it frankly felt like he hadn't really considered it before, which was crazy to me.
The point being, though, that Tor isn't really a decentralized design as the cabal is too small and the community is too tight: I am just listing it as a thing that clearly isn't decentralized and anonymous / permissionless in one place (the servers) and just kind of throws up its hands at the issue of dealing with a bratty set of users; it works because, by and large, not many people want to use it and not enough people are unhappy enough that it exists to DoS it out of existence.
I think he said it sometimes after KAX17 so around 2022 but honestly I'm not exactly sure since when he doesn't know that much anymore maybe it has been till a few years ago and not 10.
Yeah you're right it's a small group with a lot power. I have no solution to make it decentralized but I'm pretty sure if the solution includes "money" it's not a solution I like.
That may be. But that was true of virtually everything punk rock opposed, too (that there were supposed upsides as well as obvious downsides). All I'm saying is that there's nothing punk about it. I happen also to think there's little redeeming about it as well, but I'm not prepared to lay out a case for that right now.
I think there's a good argument - made very well by Viv Albertine of The Slits in her autobiography Clothes, Music, Boys - that people outside the scene took punk too seriously. They weren't great crusaders for truth and justice, they were the court jesters who pointed out the emperor had no clothes but were mostly just having fun provoking people. Which includes John Lydon pissing people off by issuing NFTs and praising Trump. It's all the same.
The Sex Pistols were a boy band, Lydon had a brief window of authenticity with PIL but has, in the last decade or so, become a caricature of himself, to the point of endorsing Thatcherism. Lydon today overtly rejects what he ostensibly "stood for" in the era of the Lesser Free Trade Hall show. You couldn't come up with a better illustration of how un-punk crypto is than a Johnny Rotten NFT.
Only libertarians are so obsessed with central banking. It seems to me that crypto people willfully ignore previous history where money was not regulated by the state and people were frustrated by instability.
In my humble opinion, it's best to have both state-regulated money and non-state-regulated money compete. The market for money itself should be a capitalist free-market competition, survival of the fittest. This is the first time in history where that scenario may come to fruition in a big way.
People have always been stuck with one or the other. Now, state-backed monies are forced to compete and maybe it will finally breed some innovation (of note, CBDCs).
If non-state currencies fail, so be it. If state currencies fail, so be it. But the competition is important imo.
Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.
> the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added
This has nothing to do with whether Bitcoin, or some MLM scheme, or Ponzi's postal reply coupons have value or not. For over a century they've all promoted the scam as power to the little guy.
Also if you're tired of fiat money, there are alternatives - like commodities. Precious metals like gold have had use value for millennia.
> Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.
I remember fondly the very early years of bitcoins, when it was worth nothing. I was probably too naïve at the time and didn't see the libertarian agenda of a lot of people, but it really did seem like a lot of the community was made of cryptopunks, excited with this idea of a cryptographic distributed virtual currency. Something that felt like it came straight out of a sci-fi novel.
At the time, I think a lot of people (including me) thought that it could maybe help people in authoritarian country, make international transfer cheaper and faster, and digitize banks which felt so behind (I remember having to still call my bank on the phone to be able to do a lot of operations).
This sadly very promptly disappeared. It should have been obvious that a lot of rule surrounding banking where there for a reason. Cryptocurrencies became widely used (and recognized) for its criminal usage, facilitating ransomware, scams, money laundering, financing terrorism and other criminal network. Sure it was fun, and innocent enough, to be able to buy a bag of weed "anonymously" from the dark web, but sadly a lot of usage was darker than that.
Authoritarian country, and again it should have been obvious, didn't have much trouble regulating their usage to a point that it couldn't be safely used in a amount that was not insignifiant. But most just didn't care because it didn't actually changed anything for them.
And then years and years of development, but no significant progress seemed to be made. Transaction where impossible to scale and became massively expensive and the fundamental flaw of the technology seems to be insurmontable.
Ethereum came with a nice promise also, the idea of a global decentralized machine. Program that could be run "on-the-chain" and enforced contract, promising to get rid of the need of a third party. But it also became obvious that it had all the disadvantage of having no third party and none of the advantage.
The crypto community also manage to prove to a massive extent the usefulness of regulation. There was a time where every day there were multiple new cryptocurrency with a nice shiny website, a white paper full of buzzword and not much else, promising a ICO in a few days. Then once the whole pump and dump was done, it vanished from existence. Over and over again. At some point ICO where replaced by NFT. Different name, same result. After the hype (a.k.a the marketing period), you were left with a useless and worthless digital token, and the only way to get rid of it was trying hard to convince other that it was worth anything.
Although I have to say, "fake it until you make it really" seems to be a core value of any crypto-enthusiate. Despite still having no actual usefulness, outside of being a vehicule for financial speculation, so much money was dumped into the whole ecosystem that it still look like a legitimate business. Crypto.com is (was?) a prime sponsor of F1, BtcTurk had advertisement plastered all over the newly built Atatürk Airport, NFT were "brought" by very famous people, ... And in many way it was successful enough to keep attracting investment, from very serious business-suit wearing people. Will they learn from FTX ? Why would they ? They didn't learn from Mt. Gox, Theter, Ripple, the many fraudulent ICO, the obvious pump and dump. If anything, everyone turns a blind eye because at this point, you either avoid crypto like the plague, you are part of the scam, or you are the one getting scammed.
I really miss those days where it seems like a sci-fi tech. In many ways, I still want to believe, but cryptocurrencies where born on a flawed premise. They are dead, they were always dead and they will remained dead.
I'm not a crypto fan, but I think the argument would be that Bitcoin in particular wasn't created as a means of wealth accumulation, but rather as a means of avoiding government interference in "money." That may have been misguided, but I think that's the argument.
"Punk as fuck" is a good way to describe it, given the punk aesthetic and ethos have both been thoroughly absorbed and internalized by capitalism to become just another pay-to-play subculture controlled by the most powerful.
Who is "society"? Users of cryptocurrencies obviously find them useful, or hope they will be in future. The alternative to cryptocurrency and blockchain contracts are global alliances that make trading in dollars easy in all important markets and enforce contracts across jurisdictions. Billions of people who are not part of these alliances are left out and the rest are reliant on US/Europe remaining leading superpowers forever, those in power not developing a grudge against one's business and status quo enforced through military violence.
Even if we assume that Western led single market / contract arbitration regime is the way to go, threat of alternatives like crypto is the best way to get its rulemakers to behave, like to not cut off businesses that don't appeal to their sensibilities or devalue dollar with unreasonable speed. It is currently possible to order cannabis with credit card over a cell phone app. Without understanding that people would otherwise just use crypto and also evade taxes and any regulations, I am not so sure that would be the case.
"Users of cryptocurrencies obviously find them useful, or hope they will be in future"
Do they hope they'll be useful in the future because they think they're great technology that everyone should benefit from... or do they want them to be useful because they bought in early and want to get rich?
There's some interesting technology and philosophy angles there. ("What exactly is money and how does it work?") But the moment crypto became a speculative asset, it jumped the rails.
We get a lot of obviously not-ready-for-prime-time stuff hitting production because it's too lucrative (see any number of DAO and smart-contract schemes that imploded), and there's a systemic allergy to input from the outside world as to what normal consumers want (things like reversability and systemic backstops), because the current system appeals to speculators.
I'd see the case for "useful in the future" if there were more efforts to answer the no-breakthrough-tech-required "faster horses" problems people have with mainstream finance. FedNow is coming in months and will give me settlement in minutes for pennies, and likely very solid legal backing. This is faster horses. Crypto might offer similar settlement speeds, but I understand it depends on the particular chain I choose, and to an extent, how much I'm willing to pay to push the transaction through. I'd also wonder how reliably the courts will accept a crypto paper trail if there's ever a dispute on a payment. (Not necessarily because the trail is bogus, but simply because it's not a well-established precedent of who and what can be trusted)
Quick rant: it was so much fun playing with and testing the ETH ecosystem, it felt like we were really trying to reinvent how finance worked and outsourcing trust to static contracts. It felt like decentralized systems were at least plausible.
Then Elon and the second Doge wave happened... Mutant Ape NFTs getting hyped by people like Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon... Sam Bankman's clear deception and FTX buying sports stadiums... the same centralized actors that we were working to get away from completely hijacked the platform, seized the narrative, and basically tarnished all the fun aspects. It felt like when Facebook no longer required .edu emails and a flood of parents and spammers took over the website.
In most cases it's both. Like the people who were early to the Internet, they believe in a better world and they hope their early participation will be rewarded.
I was early to the internet, and the only financial benefit I ever expected from it was that I'd be able to have a good career because of the skills I'd developed.
I think early adopters more excited about being able to communicate in a fundamentally new way. The internet is more like the invention of the radio or tv.
Crypto is more like the invention of electronic cryptographically secure beanie babies with a semi-fixed supply.
Just like everything it depends on what you buy and when you buy and sell it. Post 2017 the largest theoretical gain from bitcoin so far was about 20x, if you bought at the post 2017 low in December of 2018 and sold at the 2021 high almost three years later. Gamestop stock almost matched that 20x for 2020-21 gains alone. Apple has been up well over 500x in the last 20 years.
Ethereum was a better deal during this time, but you'd have to know to buy it. And some people really made bank on altcoins, but again, right time to buy, right time to sell.
There's a limit on how much the crypto market can be worth with people still able to use it as a currency to buy things. Logarithmically we're closer to the top than to the original bottom, though like all markets timing can still yield very good returns, especially if everyone else is hodling like Fort Knox.
That's the problem with many hyped assets: they're only profitable in the short term if you buy in before the pump, and sell before the dump.
I still believe Ethereum is poised for a fair amount of growth in the long-term, though likely nothing near the rise it's enjoyed in it's last run. I say that only because it's an on-ramp to so many other cryptocurrencies.
For those with enough Eth to stake, Ethereum has the bonus that so many stocks due: perpetual dividends. Unlike stocks Ethereum, as a whole, doesn't have a liquidation value. The dividends are it. And your particular share of the pie can be constantly diluted by further stakes. Is a vote required to allow further stakes? Or can anyone stake if they meet criteria?
This strikes me more like a buyer's club than a stock.
It's a pretty big claim to say the ability to purchase cannabis online is due to crypto.
The legalization movement started well before crypto, and the consumer laziness to anything except online shopping has also been around a long time. It's a pretty "natural" development. Also, it's not available everywhere.
How does shifting from a physical currency based on the petrodollar to a digital currency backed by the petrodollar address any of this? Technology cannot solve problems of power…
Per Investopedia the petrodollar system was established in the mid-1970’s [0]
Per Wikipedia, the Vietnam war lasted from 1951-1975 and Laos from 1959-1975 [1]
In any case the argument wasn’t that the US only invades countries that try to sell oil in currencies other than USD.
It was that anytime a country tries to sell oil in a currency other than USD they automatically become enemies of the US and get invaded.
> How about militarydollar or imperialismdollar or neocondollar.
I think all those labels are also appropriate now that the Petrodollar system seems to be collapsing with Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and India all exploring the possibility of trading oil outside the dollar.
I see now -- the specific label of petro is wrong, but the general idea that the hegemonic control of critical commodities -> currency control is not then? And saying petrodollar would be like saying porkyuen or semiconductoryuen or something similar
>Billions of people who are not part of these alliances are left out and the rest are reliant on US/Europe remaining leading superpowers forever, those in power not developing a grudge against one's business and status quo enforced through military violence.
The claim that the only reason the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world is because the US military would invade anyone who uses something else is so often repeated on HN and reddit that is has become canon.
It would be interesting to read something that goes deeper into that topic.
In the mean time someone should tell European pension funds that they should not be betting what amounts to the combined GDP of several nations on just the S&P500.
> The claim that the only reason the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world is because the US military would invade anyone who uses something else is so often repeated on HN and reddit that is has become canon.
No, it isn’t. Nobody said this, certainly not GP.
What is canon is that US military might gives its economy a level of stability not enjoyed by any other country, and when combined with the size of the economy, makes the dollar an important asset for nearly everyone.
Most countries in the world don’t use the dollar, and yet the dollar remains hugely important to those economies. Who is suggesting the US is going to invade those countries?
US military would move against agents who disturbs free trade between willing participants, in circumstances where US itself is not trying to restrict free trade with sanctions. More or less, also not saying it's always a negative, just that it doesn't cover everyone's needs and is not guaranteed to do so for eternity.
Hey, at least people who buy drugs with bitcoin are actually getting tangible goods. Despite everything, TSR might have been the most "legitimate" use of cryptocurrency to date.
What an entitled, uninformed and privileged thing to say. People who live under oppressive regimes use monero to gain access to information or to pay evade government spying.
A Ponzi scheme pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.
The US economy has problems, but I don't see how that's supposed to be one of them.
I don't think it's even (in 2023) a good model for BTC, although the adverts I saw for it when I first heard about it around the $250 price absolutely were that, and there are plenty of clone-coins that still do today.
2. If Social Security were to fail, the US government would be free to decide between canning it (or reducing it) or funding it from more taxes (or delaying retirement age, which is kinda both); in none of these cases is this itself going to threaten the USA economy or the USD currency.
Most crypto currencies don't and probably never will. But those such as Bitcoin that are the most decentralized and censorship resistant are crucial to those living under authoritarian regimes and whose currencies are going through significant debasement. The mad rush to make a quick buck and the propaganda from those in power have distorted the original intent behind crypto.
Also, corporations such as Nvidia that depends on the good will of the government are motivated to fall in line with the government's stance, which is negative given the threat it poses to the power and control they maintain having USD as the world reserve currency.
That's just the problem. It's very popular with people who want to bypass the law. Occasionally that's crucial and laudable. Usually it's drugs and illegal pornography. Which makes its use for anything legal dubious.
If it ever could have broken that stigma, the swarm of speculators and scammers made that impossible.
Is the law always correct? Specifically in totalitarian countries? The internet is also a tool for braking the law with unrestricted information. Bitcoin is unrestrained money. All the bitcoin copycats controlled by individuals are scams tho
It doesn't have to be anonymous to be censorship resistant or useful in those environments. It takes more work, sure, but it's not a must-have property of the system in order to be resistant to censorship.
Read a big story about people setting up illicit mining farms in Venezuela (?), using the proceeds to buy goods and have them shipped to them, providing sustenance to those in their community. Unfortunately the government realized the dilapidated grid was hemmorhaging power in the area, tracked them down, and shut it all down.
It doesn't seem like Bitcoin, etc. are widely used enough to be crucial to a society such as you describe. And I have a hard time imagining how they could become so, given the difficulty in converting that society's standard currency to cryptocurrency.
That is such a small user base and governments have already shown they can confiscate crypto of they think it's a priority. The main use I see is in the midst of currency crisis, but that is fairly rare.
As someone that implements smart contracts I can agree with that opinion. Most of cryptocurrency users are using them because of FOMO, they read on social networks sponsored ads about big gains and they enter 21st century casinos created by modern Madoffs, waiting for airdrops in hope to make money etc. Reality is that most lose money but like with gambling maybe the next airdrop or next DeFi project will be a jackpot or this time they will be first adopters and other users will be left holding the bag. It's really sad because technology is great.
“I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff” - Michael Kagan, Nvidia CTO
If I sold shovels and meth users liked to dig swimming pools in their back yards at 3:00 am I might say my shovels weren't doing anything good for humanity, but I'd be happy to sell them shovels.
and if meth users randomly digging swimming pools used more energy than Norway (1-2% of total electricity usage) then he'd have a point!
Like if industrious meth users were buying up all the bulldozers so nobody else could get their socially-productive stuff built, and measurably increasing the national consumption of fuel, then yeah, probably something would be done about that after like, the third or fourth multi-year meth-construction wave.
"oh but it's renewable" yeah not always, like that investment group that bought a shuttered coal-fired power plant in new york (Greenidge) and brought it back online to use it to mine crypto. After their permits were denied, another group went and tried to buy an operating powerplant (Fortistar).
And even if it's renewable that energy could be offsetting carbon somewhere else on the grid, or stored, or doing literally anything productive (aluminum manufacturing, etc) instead of just generating random nonces and seeing whether they'll validate.
Even in best-case scenario, where the energy is literally going unused: why would we want to build a crypto farm to soak up excess hydro energy or whatever instead of an aluminum plant? it's socially maladaptive behavior brought on by speculative fervor and socially irresponsible misallocation/incentives/lack of regulation.
Building a Pollution Machine that turns coal into random numbers you sell for money is a Captain Planet villain plot.
Let's not forget that Nvidia/GPU mining likely represents a small fraction of total crypto currency mining power consumption since Bitcoin is mostly ASIC.
Blockchain and Web3 ended up mostly being zero sum games. But that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of being so much more. Who remembers the silly <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags? The Web has come a long way. And personally, for all its faults, I find Web3 better than Web2 in terms of economics - rather than giant server farms and Big Tech monopolies, we have UniSwap and Aave Marketplace and Filecoin etc. The network is owned by the participants and no shareholder class to extract rents.
Well, ironically AI can be a far bigger negative for society than blockchain.
AI can literally destroy all our systems. Its upside may be far lower than its downside.
Yet HN loves AI and hates blockchain. Predictable this will be silently downvoted into oblivion because it challenges that narrative, but I would have definitely preferred actual substantive discussion.
> Who remembers the silly <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags?
I remember them.
I don't understand why you're referring to them.
Is it because we replaced them with auto-play videos and javascript carousels?
> Well, ironically AI can be a far bigger negative for society than blockchain.
> AI can literally destroy all our systems. Its upside may be far lower than its downside.
"Can"? "May"? Yes, of course. Because, unlike crypto it actually does stuff beyond just turning energy into maths, and that stuff can be used for evil.
Cryptocurrency, despite being an interesting idea, has mostly only been the combination of all that's bad about fiat money with all that's bad about commodity money. I remain open to the idea that smart contracts have uses.
And in reverse, AI "can" help us invent all the cool scifi tech we want that's within the laws of physics, and "may" help us build a Dyson swarm around every star we can reach.
I recommend against letting either word become load-bearing.
> The network is owned by the participants and no shareholder class to extract rents.
Dumb question. But if the network is owned by the participants, then why do all the networks have a centralized authority managing them? The participants rarely have autonomy.
I mean, who owns Uniswap for instance? What can they do — start collegting the extra 0.3% fee? That’s about it. The people own the network, and they all rely on the same code.
Web3 protocols at their best are like that. By contrast, FTX and Binance are “crypto-adjacent”, they aren’t decentralized or onchain at all.
Uniswap labs owns the GitHub repo, domain name, and discord servers. If their domain, discord, etc disappears, the project would struggle because their smart contracts are difficult to use without the web apps and it would damage the trust in the project.
Uniswap owners can shut down their website. They can introduce a 100% fee. They can deactivate their contracts.
Yes, people can still use their smart contracts in 5 years, but the adoption of those contracts will quickly decline without uniswap labs.
Yes. I said in my first comment that you can use other tools to access smart contracts.
My point is, all of these tools have central leadership and centralized auxiliary services (DNS, discord, etc). Without the centralized leadership or centralized services, these protocols can’t function.
While its worth considering the power structures behind a project, and what would happen for example if Uniswap Labs decides to put their weight behind a particular fork, or proposes a new version - the protocols can and d function without centralized leadership.
Even today, every wallet's swap feature is already an aggregator across multiple DEXes - neither theU Uniswap website nor their discord nor their leadership team are required for the protocol to continue to function.
Reminder: TornadoCash is still up and running and actively used.
> But that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of being so much more.
No, the enormous amount of wasted investment and energy with no progress means that it's not capable of being much more. Crypto somehow managed to start at its best and most productive, and got worse day by day. Buying pizzas or drugs with Bitcoin was so much funner than what crypto developed into.
I think the chef is saying that most people buy it and don't complain, even when it's out-of-season, and selling sea urchin is (presumably) profitable, so it's worth the occasional customer complaining about the taste.
I mean it's not really on them, they're in the business of selling cards that happen to be usable for crypto mining, they even had an effort to stop it with lhr models.
Rather than collapsing, Ethereum sought to reduce the energy footprint and they did. Now Nvidia is angry that nobody wants to pay a premium for a 4090 that catches fire.
Nvidia has (essentially) 100% market share in ML and 50% greater market share than AMD in desktop/gaming[0].
First, a top of the line card like the 4090 blows away everything else in terms of perf. Second, it (and other Nvidia hardware) is actually usable for something other than driving a display/gaming.
In the end a 30% (or whatever) premium for cards that offer better performance and can actually do stuff results in the obvious (buy Nvidia).
I think a more defensible phrase would be "net negative to society". Crypto has its positive uses, but you have to balance those against the negatives of slow transfer speeds, speculative bubbles, scams, energy consumption, and carbon emissions.
Also, it needs to be said that Nvidia is probably just jumping on the next marketing bandwagon by pivoting to LLMs after the collapse of crypto. This doesn't seem like a principled stance they are taking.
FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love. That's what is missing from many crypto discussions on HN because too many people have hitched their assessment of crypto into their personality and can't try and be even the tiniest bit nuanced. I hate that some people blindly want to boost crypto and can't say anything bad about it, and some people want to act like crypto personally shot their dog and is responsible for most of the ills of the world.
> Crypto has its positive uses, but you have to balance those against the negatives of slow transfer speeds, speculative bubbles, scams, energy consumption, and carbon emissions.
How people balance these things out is subjective, but I see it as a question of values. If for example, you believe that what safety net that crypto offers from government destruction of currencies is of paramount importance, then it might outweigh any conceivable negatives. Conversely, inflation and government destruction of currencies is (IMO still sadly) not even in many peoples' radar screen. Everybody's cost-benefit analysis would be different here because their values and knowledge are different.
> Also, it needs to be said that Nvidia is probably just jumping on the next marketing bandwagon by pivoting to LLMs after the collapse of crypto. This doesn't seem like a principled stance they are taking.
Agreed. And we can all predict that if/when Crypto makes any kind of big financial comeback, many people who tried to signal their virtue by denouncing it will adjust their public position on crypto and happily make money on it.
Hell, I'd be very surprised if the people personally involved in this story don't hold at least some crypto as a "just in case" sort of side-bet even while publicly denouncing it.
>FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I don't have any financial or personal stake in crypto so I don't have any issue criticizing it and I am pretty pessimistic about it at this point. But the irrational hatred and dismissal of crypto sometimes bothers me more than the irrational optimism.
I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function. To run a cryptocurrency you still need a functioning power grid, datacenters, internet, and chip manufacturing/importing, all of which depend on a pre-existing political system and economy. I find it implausible that we will migrate all of these systems to run 100% on crypto with the current state of the technology. You could argue that it's feasible with some hypothetical much-better-bitcoin, but that's just speculation at this point and not something I would want to stake the future of whole societies on.
> I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function.
I'm not sure about the necessity of political infrastructure, but crypto depending on physical infrastructure is relatively true because I have to assume that calculating Bitcoin transactions by hand without a power grid is more of an involved math problem than most humans are able to do. We all (or I think most of us) want and need a stable and functional society with the lights staying on to function.
And that stable society is what I'm concerned about with Fiat currencies. Without being backed up by anything, there is nothing that actually limits how much money printing can be done. We're already starting to reap some of the benefits of short-sighted policies in our current economies and have seen many historical examples of what happens to societies that ruin their own currencies.
In contrast, as one example, Bitcoin can only ever have 21 million units. This limitation alone is worth almost any negative, IMO. And let's examine those negatives. Are they actually a big deal? Slow transactions in a layer 1 crypto suck, but are a relatively minor and solvable problem in the grand-scheme of things with different settlement layers being possible. More electricity usage than is ideal is a cost to be sure, but to me seems like a relatively minor issue when the technology for cleanly producing large amounts of electricity has existed for decades through nuclear power. To me, Bitcoin's negatives are real, but are far closer to the category of "minor inconveniences" than "fundamental flaws".
But Fiat's negatives have the potential to be a civilization ender. A dead government currency can cause unbelievable chaos on the level of "bodies piling up in the streets".
For example, for Argentinians, Ukrainians and Turkish cryptocurrencies are order of more magnitude more useful than Americans. In these societies it is most likely net positive.
>Crypto has its positive uses, but you have to balance those against the negatives of slow transfer speeds, speculative bubbles, scams, energy consumption, and carbon emissions.
Good list on the negatives, but don't forget child trafficking, drugs, and other illegal uses. Like you, I have a hard time seeing a net positive when you add it all up.
It's not clear to me there would be less child trafficking, drug crime, etc. if crypto didn't exist. Also, if online drug markets didn't exist, more people would put themselves in risky situations in real life to buy drugs for personal use, which is a negative (assuming they aren't otherwise harming anyone).
It doesn’t seem like they’re salty but more that they don’t have to pretend to be pro-crypto anymore.
Put yourself in the position of someone who is fiercely proud of the work they do making GPUs and all the really cool stuff people do with it — video games, cgi rendering, AI, number crunching for scientific computing.
Then all of a sudden the shelves are empty because people want to push boulders up a hill and roll them back down and the people who are doing the cool stuff are getting priced out by the competitive boulder rollers who just want want a better boulder to watt ratio.
It would take the wind out of my sails because it’s harder to wake up and say, “look at all the cool stuff people are doing with the thing we made.”
Accusing someone of not energetically attacking their main income source, whether they thought it was shit at the time or not, is not an own.
Maybe I think I suck at painting, so take it up as a joke to bother a friend of mine. I get lucky and start selling paintings by the busload for thousands of dollars each, although I put no more effort into any of them than the first. In fact, since the first took me over an hour to do, I move exclusively to monochromatic drip paintings. When, a decade and tens of millions of dollars later, after my prices crash, I announce publicly that the art market is stupid... is it shrewd not to believe me?
I will say, it seemed like right about the time the crypto markets collapsed again was right when AI application really started taking off and creating great demand. So I think the demand has remained roughly consistent. The big difference being folks with AI needs getting devices purpose build by nVidia for their needs, versus hobbyists buying up stock of consumer cards.
They were never particularly pro-crypto. When miners were buying GPUs by the pallet load Nvidia was publicly downplaying mining and saying GPUs were for gaming.
"Senior executives at the company sought to capitalize on that demand with a specialized line of cards just for cryptomining, the SEC wrote, but Nvidia salespeople and the company’s internal estimates suggested cryptomining was still accounting for “a significant factor in the year-over-year growth in Gaming revenue.”"
They settled with SEC for hiding profit cannibalization from investors.
Also as the article hints on the hypocrisy, Kagan built a company selling to high frequency traders.
I think the hypocrisy and sourness are abundant qualities in this statement.
They did that very late when the backlash from gamers was at its peak, and they released this thing at the same time: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
Wrong. Cryptocurrency demonstrate what electronic payment system should look like: without ability to sell user data and spy on users. Cryptocurrency is the payment system which is designed only for payment without unnecessary features.
Today if you pay with card you basically consent to collecting your data by corporations and following you offline and online, creating a detailed history of your activity. Corporations exchange data with each other, so using card on only one site or in one app can make your identity known to hundreds of other sites even when using incognito mode. With face recognition surveillance can be extended even to places where you don't use the card. And there is no way to opt out from it.
I don't give a f*k about someone following my activities, I'm not doing anything illegal, that's why I don't understand this privacy craze going on. The most they can do is show me some personalized ads and I don't care. But the downside is getting scammed, get money stolen and not being able to figure out who did that.
That's what anonymity feature of crypto promotes which I think is a much bigger deal, especially if you count all transactions it enables on dark web.
I'm sorry, you are actually committing crimes because you are (not woke enough || too woke) based on the Online Responsibility Act of 2025 after the _________ party won the presidency, house, and senate.
And I mean, I mostly agree with you, crypto seems to be a hive of scum and villainy, at the same time having every moment of our lives tracked to be judged by the whims of the future is a very risky proposition.
>I don't give a f*k about someone following my activities
Go buy some Cuban cigars. Go start/put on an anti-Modi demonstration in India.
You've got nothing to hide exactly because you haven't found yourself on the "wrong side of the tracks" yet. I assure you, the point will come when you sift into a disenfranchised bucket; then you will.
About 509 years ago the Dutch invented common stock in companies, creating a new way for humans to work together. That had long-term sociological impact in society.
Today, there are people who have created new ways of working together by building on top of bitcoin, where its not a company or a legal entity of any king, but people who may not know or trust each other in meatspace are collaborating and getting paid for their work as they deliver products and services. And their collaboration is governed by humans, not a smart contract, but in a decentralized manner to protect their project. They're developing software, providing customer support, tutorials, project management, etc, and all of it being paid for by the project---all without bank accounts, a corporation, or geographic dependency.
As far as I'm aware, https://bisq.network/dao/ is the only running project that gas built functioning governance on top of bitcoin. I know that the MakerDAO (that runs the DAI stablecoin) and ShapeShift (altcoin exchange) have been built and are running in top of Ethereum or other altcoins. So that's at least three separate projects creating value in historically new ways.
When I explained this to a sociologist friend of mine, she was amazing, asking who's studying and writing about such historically important innovation.
I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society. Its trailblazing, hinting at the new possibilities that combining the Internet with programmable decentralized permissionless censorship-resistant money could bring to humanity. Only time will show which approaches bear long-term fruit here, but there's a lot of potential.
> I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society.
Can you list examples of how it has helped society as a whole? Nothing you listed has anything to do with helping society. You've listed things you think are good things, but nothing is a society wide benefit. Building on top of Bitcoin or Etherium is great and all... But how does that help the average person? I've seen no trickle down or benefits from crypto that are anything but pure speculation akin to sports gambling.
It helps libgen, sci-hub stay funded and makes Argentines, many other nations hold USD equivalent. It makes remittance much more cheaper and easier too
One idea of capitalism, is that there are indirect benefits to everyone, from the actions of private self-interested parties. If crypto somehow allows more people to work together (I don't have an opinion if this is true or not), then that alone should be enough for it to fit into the western ethic.
No, because employees can own a portion of the very company they work for and get paid interest to hold it in the form of dividends, investors can do the same and it goes into the company and its growth. How is that remotely like Crypto? People collaborating on random projects isn't at all the same, especially when so far...not a single one of these projects has had a net benefit on anyone's life. Meanwhile public companies do. If crypto projects were actually solving problems instead of constantly reinventing and complicating the wheel, maybe you could say otherwise...but so far that hasn't happened, and we're sneaking up on 20 years of this.
You missed one of the most important DAOs / Exchanges which is Uniswap, which popularized the concept of AMMs and is now doing billions each day in volume.
Not to forget, their token drop to actual users and after that it went publicly up in real value and still holds similar to first price, unlike scammy financially enginered Tech IPOs. Really easy to compare and see the diffence.
To me it's very weird people compare AI to crypto. Except that there's a lot of hype behind them and they're fundamentally a technology (and tend to be run on a GPU), they don't have anything in common.
I can say a lot of bad things about crypto but I don't want to regurgitate all of it.
But let's just say I don't know anyone who uses it like regular money, but I do know some people who use it as an 'investment' and hedge against fiat. If the thing doesn't have underlying value, it's worthless. Not saying it will never take off, and there are some third world countries that use it, but the state it's in right now is WAY overhyped and 99% of the usecase is ponzi scheme bullshit, scams and FOMO.
AI is fundamentally different, it's a complete game changer. My wife who is not technically inclined uses ChatGPT daily for her work. Yesterday there was an article about artists who have been made redundant, and are now using AI to genereate the 'art' for them. This thing has a CRAZY amount of value.
> To me it's very weird people compare AI to crypto. Except that there's a lot of hype behind them and they're fundamentally a technology (and tend to be run on a GPU), they don't have anything in common.
The “it has no value” argument against crypto currencies is flawed in my opinion because value is subjective.
When you say “it is worthless because it has no value”, you’re saying “it has no value to me therefore it couldn’t possibly have value for anyone”.
There’s plenty of value in something like Bitcoin for example (e.g. as a store of value, or low fees for large transactions, crossing borders without having your money seized).
100% agree. this is like the internet in 1996 or the model T or the printing press... the bottle is now open and we have no idea what it will do but there's no way to put that genie back in. I'm not a bullish person but it seems the impact this will have on society is immeasurable. what happens when a large chunk of the workforce suddenly becomes unneeded? what happens when the propaganda becomes so sophisticated that even trained people can not distinguish it from fiction? in a short timeframe we went from ai generated finger colors to having to check the hands to see if it's ai to having to really struggle to see if it's ai. i don't know. I am a techie and i am not a ludite but feel that just like social media that this will be a net loss for society.
Part of the problem with these sorts of analyses is that it looks as 'crypto' as a class rather than specific cryptos. Monero is actively used as a currency, and I'd say a much higher percentage of its userbase uses it for that purpose compared to other cryptocurrencies.
"Hey, we really can't keep up this system of just letting anyone graze sheep on the commons willy-nilly. Eventually it'll get overgrazed and produce nothing. To prevent that catastrophe, we need to move to a system where total grazing is limited to a sustainable level."
'Well, then why are you grazing your sheep on the commons? Checkmate.'
They work, millions use them, but people constantly want to tear them down and claim they have no use.
You can just not use them. You almost certainly won't be presented with a case in your everyday life in which someone refuses your cash and only accepts Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, every day it becomes harder and harder to avoid using Visa or Mastercard as stores go cash free.
We have been doing finance for centuries and governance for millennial. The internet has been around for a few decades.
If Crypto is going to have meaningful impact on either of those two domains it may take a while.
I agree there are many grifter scammy things in crypto.
Fwiw it seems plausible to me that crypto/blockchain could provide value eventually as a realtime, open, highly available database about economic activity. Reliable economic information is valuable, scarce and seldom realtime.
However this depends on economic entities having an initial reason to make certain transactions on the blockchain and it's unclear what they'd get out of doing that.
I always chuckle when someone claims anything to be good or bad for "society" as if the human experience is somehow uniform across the globe. Oh please
As I replied to a comment elsewhere on this post: They capitalized to the maximum the demand and ending up seriously cannibalizing their profits, which they hid. They ended up settling with the SEC on the matter.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/tech/nvidia-sec-settlement-cr...
Specifically, Nvidia had to settle for misleading investors, as they hid that Nvidia's specific for crypto-mining series were cannibalizing gaming and ai profits.
Nvidia is also using its monopoly now to dictate what workloads one can run with the hardware they buy. All "to save the world" against distributed protocols, which have left Nvidia behind. I find that disturbing and problematic. At what point will Nvidia demand a subscription model to allow one to use their screen or game or train and host their own LLaMa model?
> Crypto, by contrast, was more like high-frequency trading, an industry that had led to a lot of business for Mellanox, the company Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia.
Yes, its financial services, which is the biggest sector on the planet. That's never been controversial except to individual contributors that put their head in the sand to financial services.
The same arguments of lacking "usefulness" and "utility" are the same ones that some people choose to have against all financial services, which is very far divorced from any reality that matters.
Yes, 99% of the financial services sector and all currency has nothing to do with using it as regular money. The same distribution as seen in crypto.
It often feels like like people don't know that they are relying on a standard that applies to things they respect. Like, they're criticizing "crypto" while describing the thing they appreciate.
Convenient of them to pronounce it now as the world has moved on to AI bandwagon which suits Nvidia just fine. I wonder where was this enlightenment couple of years ago when the demand for GPUs was through the roof.
I eagerly anticipate the day CUDA no longer has a stranglehold on ML libraries; it's just absurd that one must purchase Magical Hardware when damn near every laptop has a GPU in it just not the GPU
I wonder what kind of society Nvidia wants? Crypto (some of it) offers a freedom to buy and spend that is not corporately regulated. Some crypto brings huge investment in energy production; Green where the society structures it to be, not green where the society structures it not to be.
Did they think gaming brought more value to society?
Its nice that AI will 'reinvent nearly every industry', but i suspect it will just become another focusing tool to focus more wealth onto the very wealthy.
Complete ignorance, byzantine fault tolerance is a great addition to society. No need to rely on intermediaries for trusted communication. This is not limited to financial transactions. Clear benefits to society are: oppression resistant voting systems, decentralized energy grid (solar power redistributed), reliable property rights (for under-developed / corrupt countries), transparent supply chain management (avoid counterfeits, traceability of sources, theft…etc)
Utility is perceived by those that find something useful. I’m not a crypto user, but enough people find it useful that I don’t deny it’s utility to someone else. It requires a special kind of arrogance to deny the utility someone else perceives, and those arrogant folks are usually blindsided when that utility becomes broadly perceived.
Nvidia should stick with what they know - producing AI hardware and AI pipelines. This is how Intel got disrupted - by trying too much beyond what they were fundamentally innovating in. There are many useful applications in cryptocurrency tech. We are only at the beginning stages of R&D in this space.
I don't know how anyone can say "we're still early" or "we are only at the beginning stages of R&D in this space" considering crypto is 14 years old and has had marquee VC and other investment to the tune of tens/hundreds of billions of dollars for at least half a decade.
Cryptocurrency generation mechanics are 14 years old. Run-time and application deployables on top are not 14 years old. This is a brand new space and it's still in its infancy. Ethereum is an amazing technology.
Ethereum is eight years old. The Ethereum foundation alone has a billion dollars. Ethereum and the related ecosystem has had tens of billions of dollars thrown into it. I don’t know how that can be described as “infancy”.
The web was opened by CERN in 1993. By 2001 it was being used by over 500 million people daily. Please look at an eth block explorer and tell me how many people are using it daily.
I’ll spoil it for you: in terms of the five billion people on the internet, essentially no one.
How long is the crypto community going to excuse the complete adoption failure, horrendous and unacceptable behavior, etc with “it’s still early”? Please point to another technology with tens of billions of dollars of investment and almost a decade of development described as being in infancy.
I swear we’ll be here in another decade hearing the same thing.
If there's anything the crypto community needs to do - stop pumping, shilling, sticking your head in the sand in fantasy land, step out of your echo chamber, and take a good hard look to figure out why no one is using whatever you're building.
Maybe then, and only then, will these applications ever step out of complete obscurity.
Facebook acquired Oculus 9 years ago, spent billions yet active users are similiar to crypto probably. So another tech like you said exist and Crytpo is being used for meaningful things too. But you are just too ignorant to even learn about it, sadly. There many like you here.
Well don't get me started on VR either (FOV, FPS, motion sickness, limited applications, etc). FYI billions on a proprietary commercial product from one vendor isn't even in the same universe as an order of magnitude more investment across an entire diverse ecosystem. What's your point here?
Too ignorant to learn about it? I built and ran a 25kW Ethereum mining operation with 200 Nvidia Pascal GPUs in 2017. I've been running my own nodes and writing and deploying smart contracts since then. I have every wallet you can think of. I own ENS names. I developed a solution[0] to index and search every NFT (260m representing 100tb of data) across multiple chains (from my own self-hosted geth/bor/heimdall/Solana nodes all the way to custom ERC parsers). I've been to multiple dev and industry conferences. I've had multiple high level meetings with just about everyone in the space from Alchemy, Consensys, and Coinbase to blue chip crypto VC firms like Multicoin Capital, Sequoia, and A16z for my various crypto projects.
I could go on and on. I'd argue there aren't many people out there that have my knowledge and experience this wide and deep across the ecosystem. Please do tell - what experience do you have?
But yes, keep dismissing me out of hand by calling me ignorant and providing nothing factual to support your narrative.
I can assure you that incredible software is being built and deployed. It's just a matter of time. Go ahead and come back to this post in a year and see.
Amid a torrent of AI-generated content, cryptographic signatures in cameras strike me as a useful application of blockchain technology. There will always be a market for authenticity because photojournalism has strategic value.
> cryptographic signatures in cameras strike me as a useful application of blockchain technology
As always with "blockchain", you have to ask the question, "couldn't this be done with non-blockchain technologies, at a fraction of the energy cost?"
There are as far as I can see two things which could be authenticated: "was this photo taken by a physical camera", and "was this photo taken at a particular moment in time". For the first, the camera could sign the RAW file, and append a certificate signed by the camera's manufacturer; AFAIK, cameras which do that already exist. For the second, cryptographic timestamp services are older than blockchain (RFC 3161, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping for alternatives), and IIRC were used in Windows to timestamp signed binaries, so that they would keep working even after the key used to sign them expired (as long as the signature was timestamped prior to that expiration).
Reminder: when a corporation says “useful” they mean “profitable.” I’m not on the crypto bandwagon, I just want folks to take anything a corp says with a grain of salt.
> I just want folks to take anything a corp says with a grain of salt.
Exactly. As soon as Ethereum switched to a more emissions friendly consensus mechanism, there was no need to use wasteful GPUs which already were burning up th e planet.
Of course a shovel maker would now see GPU mining as unprofitable. As long as AI is still inefficient in the way it goes by training neural networks, then Nvidia will always be its shovel maker (until someone finds a cheaper and efficient alternative way that doesn't require GPUs)
Does your comment also cover not trusting exchanges that back stable coins with pure fraud or pump and dump coins before listing them on their exchanges... Or does this only cover companies and individuals that think crypto has yet to find a good Avenue in society?
i think it was nvidia's ceo who said like a year ago (maybe more) that eth would be worth 8k usd soon... but agreed, not saying anything about its 'usefulness'
THE US DOLLAR ADDS NOTHING USEFUL TO SOCIETY. how about that?
Two banks with a lot of exposure to risky cryptocurrency startups collapsed and the cryptobros immediately used that to push FUD that all banks will soon collapse and everyone should move their money to crypto. And it worked.
Not a single popular movement lies as much as the cryptobros and repeatedly get away with it.
No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to mine it with GPUs. Crypto obviously does not "need parallel processing" in the way that Nvidia GPUs provide it, because Ethereum removed that requirement entirely.
Nvidia's statement is like a shovel manufacturer declaring gold mining dead because people are no longer buying shovels (because they moved on to backhoes).